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Days ago, Barry Friesen was scrambling to find a way to properly dispose of the mountain of rib bones that will be left behind after Etobicoke’s Ribfest this weekend.

“The city wants us to separate our organics and recycling but our challenge was where was it to go?” said Friesen, in charge of waste for the Rotary Club annual event at Centennial Park (June 30-July 3.)

Across the GTA this summer, scores of outdoor food-and-beverage-focused events held in public spaces will produce piles of trash that organizers must separate and dispose of as a condition of their permits.

Along with the plastic clamshell and foam polystyrene containers, plastic cups and pizza boxes — which can all be recycled — will be an abundance of organic material, including leftover food, vegetable scraps, bones and soiled tissues and paper towels.

Much of it will be heading to landfill.

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And, up until two years ago, most of the waste from the west-end Ribfest, in its 17th year this summer, was also sent to a landfill or incinerator, with some recycling of beer cans and cardboard. In past years, the Ribfest generated up to 16 dumpsters of solid waste.

Camp 31 Barbeque staff get chicken and ribs on the grill at Toronto Ribfest, an event that's trying to compost its waste. (Vince Talotta/Toronto Star)

Enter Friesen, a Rotarian and professional engineer with a passion for helping the environment through the elimination of waste. He runs CleanFARMS, a not-for-profit organization that runs programs that manage agricultural plastic and other inorganic material from farms.

Most outdoor events rely on garbage bins to collect all manner of discarded waste that can’t be separated, so “it’s like unscrambling an omelette by the end of it,” Friesen said.

So Ribfest did something different. Organizers got rid of garbage bins and set up recycling tents. Inside, an army of volunteers sort through the leftovers, separating the organics from the recycling from the rest.

Last year, Ribfest diverted 59 per cent of its waste from landfill, including sending its organics to a facility in Niagara for composting. The Recycling Council of Ontario awarded the event a Gold Waste Minimization Award.

“We’re able to eliminate all the waste, we get all the benefits of recycling and composting, energy and greenhouse gas savings, and reduce of landfill space.”

This year, the charity event hopes to divert 80 per cent through recycling and composting. To help achieve that, the event has decreed no plastic forks or knives on site. Food vendors must provide wooden “sporks.”

“They’re a fork-knife combination and a little bit more expensive . . . but (there’s) a lot less contamination in the organic and recycling stream,” Friesen said.

But then Friesen learned the Niagara facility that accommodated Ribfest in 2015 didn’t have the capacity this year.

As recently as last weekend, he was panicking about where to send the “clean” waste. “The only way that this province is going to achieve its waste diversion goals is to ensure that there’s more capacity for organics.”

Then, Friesen got word: the city will accept Ribfest’s organic waste at one of its two organic processing facilities.

“We’re going to treat it as a bit of a pilot project to evaluate the quality of the organics, and how much contamination there is,” said Jim McKay, the city’s general manager of solid waste. “I know they’ll probably do a better job than most . . . separating material out.”

In the past, the city has found material from other summer outdoor events was heavily contaminated and almost impossible to process, McKay said.

Friesen, meanwhile, is relieved this year’s Ribfest bones will soon be compost.

“Last year we had to leave the city to be able to have it done. This year now we’re able to use the city facility, so we’re very happy about that.”

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